Rainfall at Lyttelton

Rainfall is very important for most of us living at Port Levy because it is our only source of fresh water.
The nearest raingauge is at Lyttelton. It is maintained by Lyttelton Port of Christchurch
who provide the data to the Met Service, who in turn provide them a day or two later to NIWA's CliFlo database.
Sometimes the rain gauge fails and when this happens, we use data from the automatic weather station
at Christchurch Airport. This occurred between 16-Sep and 11-Nov-2009.
A comparison of data from various rain gauges in the area is presented
here.

The plot below shows the rainfall for the last fortnight and the one below that
shows the rainfall for the last 12 months compared with historical data (from Mar-1961 to present).
For more detailed and uptodate information on rainfall, go to the
LPC Website.

There are a number of points to make about the plot:

For a particular month, the total rainfalls for that month for each year from 1961 to the present are plotted as dashes.

The year when the maximum and minimum rainfall for that month occurred is noted.

The median rainfall for that month for the entire record is a cyan circle.

The rainfall that occurred in that month in the last year is a red square

The median monthly rainfall for all months is shown as the green line.
Multiplying this value by 12 will give the median annual rainfall (about 0.6 m)